Well this magic pill is not something you’ll find at the drugstore, explains James Burg, Ph.D., an associate professor at Indiana University-Purdue, Fort Wayne, and executive director of the Healthy Marriages Sturgis program. And it’s not something you can swallow, inhale, or inject. It will take a little more effort than that… well, actually, a lot more effort. It’s called a Happy Marriage, and while it’s not a miracle cure or surefire way of preventing disease, the benefits are really incredible.

This association between marriage and health was first reported in the ’70s, with evidence accumulating that suggests powerful health benefits, at least for men. Check out this statistic: Heart disease may reduce a man’s life expectancy by six years, but bachelorhood takes 10 years off a man’s expected life span.(So I take that to mean that marriage adds 4 years to guy’s life?)

According to researcher John Gottman, “If it is a good marriage, the benefits are equally as great for women as for men; for men, just being married confers a tremendous amount of benefits.”

The obvious question: And what if it’s an unhappy marriage? Well that could increase the chances of illness by 35 percent! But this is a bridal website, and we’re looking forward to all of you having a wonderful, happy, healthy marriage, which you are committed to working on every day! And our statistics say that “working on a marriage every day does more to promote health and longevity than working out at a health club.” So skip the gym and go out for ice cream with your spouse (just kidding… kind of)!

Statisticians Bernard Cohen and I-Sing Lee, compilers of a catalog of relative mortality risks, were quoted, “Being unmarried is one of the greatest risks that people voluntarily subject themselves to.” So, while marriage is not a magical cure-all, it does seem to be the best thing going.